You have not seen any posts for the past couple of months because I have been busy migrating the IoT Map data from a big Google Sheet to a “real” database and of course learning some technologies along the way including MongoDB, Express, Node.js, Mongoose, EJS.

As I migrate the data there’s some cleanup to be done including back-filling attributes that I added along the way. Right now I’m going back and adding all of the social network IDs for each organization.

Here’s a sneak peak at one organization’s (Amazon) profile and set of IoT products/services:

That’s not what the final UI will look like, just a sample of the data that I have collected. Below is the corresponding Mongo document for Amazon.

Each organization has one or more products, in this case Alexa, Dash, Echo, AWS IoT, Prime Music. Once done, you’ll be able to select any of the integrations / technologies and see the other products and organizations that integrate or use those technologies.

Of course, the end goal is a more dynamic map that you can filter on the fly and find the info you need much faster.

I am going back into my hole now for a bit and look forward to providing another update soon.

Topspin is an Enterprise IoT security solution with features including inttelligent deception, traffic analysis, and security visibility. They are based in Mahwah, New Jersey and have an R&D facility in Herzliya, Israel.

Topspin was founded in 2013 by Doron Kolton who was previsously VP, Engineering at Breach Security, “a leading provider of web application firewall technology” [2]. Trustwave acquired Breach Security in 2010.

Roambee produces a wireless device called a “bee” with built-in GPS, SIM-based cellular data for backhaul, and a number of sensors. They also provide a cloud-based platform which I couldn’t find the name of but maybe “bee hive” would be good. The bees call home reporting location and a variety of other information.

Deutsche Telekom (DT) Strategic Investments led their Series B funding investing $3.1 million and their “corporate customer arm, T-Systems, is partnering with Roambee to offer an IoT service to track goods and assets, globally. The service tracks shipments in-transit, and it’s offered via a pay-per-use business model.” [1]

Roambee has also entered into a strategic partnership with TELUS in “my” country, Canada. [2]

The “how it works” page says the device even works inside containers which is interesting as I would not think that cellular data connectivity would work from inside a container. Some of the sensors listed include: temperature, humidity, gas, light, tampering, GPS jamming, shock, pressure, motion, and even a camera.

Enterprises can also integrate additional data into their platform using APIs and the company will also assist with enterprise integration using EDI, ERP. The platform provides real-time visualization of the bees whereabouts and sensor data and can generate alerts via SMS or email.

Davra has an IoT Application Enablement Platform (AEP) called RuBAN which can be considered an Enterprise Services Bus (ESB) / management platform for IoT that works both at the Fog and centralized level.

They are based in Sunnyvale, California with R&D in their Dublin, Ireland office. They were founded in 2010 by Brian McGlynn, the COO and Joe Quinn, the CTO. In late 2015 they received a €1.5M investment from three Irish VCs adding to the initial financing round of €1.3 million in 2013. [1]

Davra supports a large number of IoT gateways and lists their favorites under the Supported Technologies page. They also list their own “IoT Gateway Fog Controller” that “turns IoT Gateways into intelligent edge compute platforms enabling local analytics, local decision making and powerful sensor based data collection across 100+ sensor based protocols”. I could not find much info on this controller but will keep looking.

This is not typically the type of company that I’ve been adding to the map but since they are behind some significant Industrial IoT startups and they are less than an hour from my house, I figured that they deserved a pin!

McRock Capital is a Venture Capital firm that invests solely in Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) companies, specifically those at the “intersection of sensors & software and large industrial markets” [1]

I found them, and a number of other projects/products, in a great article “17 open source IoT projects to work on in 2017” [1] by Vasudhendra Badami

“Netbeast is an environment-agnostic IoT platform where you need not worry about details like wireless protocols, brand-specific public APIs, or device detection when developing IoT systems.” [1]

They have a Yeti Smartphone App on Google Play [tm] that “provides a unique smart home experience bringing all devices together, regardless of their brand and technology <snip> It allows fine control over your connected home gadgets ranging from lighting and sound systems to full automated heating and security systems.” [2]

Eter.io is an early stage software startup founded by 3 people who work at VSITE – Visoka škola za informacijske tehnologije, a private IT college in Zagreb Croatia. The founders are Jurica Đurić a lecturer, Ivan Britvic Head of Programming Department, and Anja Nikitović an Assistant at VSITE.

I’m not sure how I stumbled on them, but I found an article [1] that provides a bit of information and mentions they are currently running the system in trials at VSITE.

They are developing a commercial lighting control system which senses motion and light and learns patterns in order to conserve energy. They are “vendor independent and compliant with different industry standards (KNX, DALI, Zwave, XBee, radio) Software installation is simple, it works pretty much on all platforms though is optimized for mini computers (like Raspberry Pi)”. They also have a mobile app to “monitor and trace log of working system. And yes app enables you to remotely switch and dim lights”

I am not sure how many large commercial organizations will rely on a RPi-based lighting control system as most consider the RPi a prototyping platform.

I have decided to remove ads on my site and blog, at least for now. I will explain why I stopped but first I want to give a bit of context.

In general I strongly dislike advertising although I recognize it’s a necessary evil. I suppose what I dislike the most are wasteful ads like the inch thick collection of printed ads inserted into the local “newspaper” or the ads for services that I already subscribe to.

I ended up on the dark side and played with Google and Yahoo! ad systems 10 years ago when one of my hobbies was building and promoting a few local search sites for the city that I live in and a couple around it. I embedded Google AdSense ads in the sites and over a span of a few years (yes, years) the ads only brought in about $1,400. In the process I learned a lot about how hard SEO had become and learned more about my local community. If it had been a business, well the business would’ve died.

AdSense revenue from 2006 to 2010

Since that time I had $90 USD sitting in my Google AdSense account that I could not get out as Google only pays out once you reach $100. The $90 sat there. After a 6 year gap, I thought I would try AdSense again on my IoT blog to reach $100 and get my money out.

The IoT portion of my personal blog www.diku.ca/blog really just got started a few months ago. Initially the goal was just to generate the $10 and then stop the ads. But once I saw a little $ coming in I couldn’t stop 🙂 see, it’s evil!

The traffic on the blog is super low and growing — about 600 visitors a day at this point — so I didn’t expect a ton of ad revenue. The ads generated just over $300 and I was going to keep the ads going but a couple of problems happened.

The first problem is that, In the past couple of weeks, the ad revenue almost completely disappeared. I spent a few hours the other evening trying to figure out why I had some $16 ad revenue days and then, more recently, days with no revenue. I tried to correlate my blog and social network postings and publications with the blog visits, ad impressions/clicks but to no avail. I could not figure it out what caused this drop.

It was funny since I had actually been putting in more time providing more detailed blog posts on each company and then promoting the posts on 4 social network sites. Basically, I was doing more work and generating less ad revenue.

Here is a chart I put together showing the history of my activity for the past few months and the corresponding page views and earnings.

Analysis of activity vs. ad revenue

Not too relevant, but interesting, here’s a breakdown of which countries the revenue came from (high to low)

revenue by country, high to low

The second problem is that I had installed the Google AdSense app on my smartphone and I was checking the ad revenue a lot. It’s so much fun waking up in the morning to see that I had made a few bucks while I was sleeping but it was really a waste of time.

The third problem with ads is that they really take people away from a site instead of keeping them on it. The ads also distract from the actual content and reduce the credibility of the content.

So, for these reasons, I’ve decided to remove the evil ads at this point and get back to the content. I’m sure the readers won’t miss them and I hope they come back now that I am moving towards the light.